Tag Archives: meetings

40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up.

Invest in nonprofit journalism today.Donate now and every gift will be matched through 12/31.

Prompted by years of drought and mismanagement, a series of urgent multi-state meetings are currently underway in Las Vegas to renegotiate the use of the Colorado River. Seven states and the federal government are close to a deal, with a powerful group of farmers in Arizona being the lone holdouts.

The stakes are almost impossibly high: The Colorado River provides water to 1-in-8 Americans, and irrigates 15 percent of the country’s agricultural products. The nearly 40 million people who depend on it live in cities from Los Angeles to Denver. The river supports native nations and industry across the vast desert Southwest — including 90 percent of U.S.-grown winter vegetables. Simply put: The region could not exist in its current form without it.

Decades of warming temperatures have finally forced a confrontation with an inescapable truth: There’s no longer enough water to go around. This past winter was a preview of what the future will look like: A very low amount of snow fell across the mountains that feed the river, so water levels have plummeted to near-record low levels in vast Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the two mega-reservoirs that are used to regulate water resources during hard times.

Since then, the news has only gotten worse.

Water managers project that Lake Powell, which straddles the Arizona-Utah border, is on pace to lose 15 percent of its volume within the next 12 months. Lake Mead, which feeds hydroelectricity turbines at the Hoover Dam and is the region’s most important reservoir, will fare even worse — falling 22 percent in the next two years, below a critical cutoff point to trigger mandatory water rationing.

“Within Arizona, we must agree to share the pain,” Governor Doug Ducey said at a meeting of state water managers in Phoenix this week. For many reasons, Arizona is going to suffer first. The state relies on the river for 40 percent of its water — and some cities, like Tucson, are entirely dependent on it. The prospect of near-term shortfalls, according to Ducey, means there’s “no time to spare.”

In a dystopian twist, Las Vegas has already been planning for the worst-case scenario: Three years ago, the city completed a three-mile long tunnel to suck water from directly below Lake Mead. The tunnel will provide last-resort access to every drop of water — long after the reservoir falls an additional 125 feet, below the point that renders the Hoover Dam obsolete. At the current pace, that could happen within years.

Losing the river’s carbon-free hydropower will create electricity shortages. Unpredictable legal challenges, and perhaps interstate fighting, would escalate to the Supreme Court. Since agriculture currently consumes about 80 percent of the river’s water, it’s the obvious first place that urban areas are going to look to shore up their own supplies.

In the plans currently being discussed, within months, Southwestern farmers will have to abandon some of their irrigated cropland. That will kick off an inevitable decline of the region’s economy that could eventually reshape the entire country’s food distribution system.

Under the current rules, federal water managers project a 52 percent chance that an official water shortage will be declared in fall of 2019, with mandatory cutbacks beginning in 2020. A shortage is more than 99 percent certain the following year. The problem is, due to systematic over-use, even those cutbacks won’t be enough to prevent the river from falling still lower, so the multi-month series of meetings this year have centered around agreeing on deep cuts starting right away.

To be clear: There is no remaining scenario that does not include mandatory cutbacks in water usage along the Colorado River within the next few years. The long-awaited judgement day for the Southwest is finally here.

Dig this article?

Support nonprofit journalism by making a donation today and all gifts will be matched

. A little bit goes a long way. 

Help us raise $50,000 by December 31! 

View this article – 

40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up.

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up.

Mr. Ivanka Trump Now Under Investigation

Mother Jones

We now know for sure who the person “close to Trump” is:

Investigators are focusing on a series of meetings held by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and an influential White House adviser, as part of their probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and related matters, according to people familiar with the investigation.

So the Russia investigation now has at least three targets: Manafort, Flynn, and Kushner. That seems like a lot. But maybe it’s all just a big coincidence.

View original post here: 

Mr. Ivanka Trump Now Under Investigation

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Mr. Ivanka Trump Now Under Investigation

Tom Cotton Shouted Down After Defending Trump’s Refusal to Release Taxes

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As more Republican lawmakers put pressure on President Donald Trump to finally disclose his tax returns, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Monday held firm in defending the president’s refusal to deliver on his key campaign promise by repeating the original excuse Trump offered when he was a candidate.

“As far as I’m aware, the president said he’s still under audit,” Cotton said at a town hall meeting in Little Rock, after a constituent asked the Arkansas senator if he’d “take the initiative” and force Trump to release the relevant documents.

“It doesn’t take a lot of effort to find out where Donald Trump has connections overseas,” he continued. “He normally has his names on buildings.”

The response prompted loud jeers from the audience as well as demands for Cotton to “do your job”—a chant that’s been frequently used in contentious town halls across the country, where Republican lawmakers have been met by constituents angered by White House policies and congressional cooperation with the administration.

With the approach of tax day, the question of whether Republicans would press Trump to disclose his returns became a popular refrain during the meetings:

When Congress returns from its recess next week, the president will face his next legislative battle and rewrite the tax code. An increasing number of congressional Republicans have used the opportunity to insist Trump disclose his own returns or face insurmountable opposition as he attempts to satisfy another one of his campaign promises. In February, one of Trump’s fiercest supporters, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), surprised constituents when he said Trump should “absolutely” release his taxes.

A failure to overhaul the tax system would be the administration’s second legislative embarrassment in a row, following the GOP’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act last month.

Several state lawmakers, including a few Republicans, have recently proposed legislation to avoid this problem in the future, by mandating all presidential candidates release their returns in order to get on future state ballots.

See more here: 

Tom Cotton Shouted Down After Defending Trump’s Refusal to Release Taxes

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tom Cotton Shouted Down After Defending Trump’s Refusal to Release Taxes

Jeff Sessions Met Twice With Russian Ambassador During Trump Campaign

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

And now here comes the Washington Post on contacts between the Trump team and Russia:

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.

….Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.

That was Mike Flynn’s initial answer too, wasn’t it? That he “didn’t remember” the details of a conversation from less than half a year ago. I wonder how long Sessions’ version will hold up?

Can we all now agree that maybe Sessions really does need to recuse himself from the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia?

View original article: 

Jeff Sessions Met Twice With Russian Ambassador During Trump Campaign

Posted in alo, Cyber, FF, GE, LG, Monterey, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jeff Sessions Met Twice With Russian Ambassador During Trump Campaign

Planned Parenthood Sting Videographer Cleared of Felony Charge

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Tuesday morning, Texas prosecutors dismissed the felony charge against David Daleiden, the founder of the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress, and Sandra Merritt, one of his associates, related to their work last year in creating sting videos targeting Planned Parenthood. They were facing charges of tampering with a government record over allegations that they had made and used fake drivers’ licenses to facilitate their meetings with Planned Parenthood staffers.

Under Daleiden’s leadership, the CMP last summer released a series of secretly-recorded, deceptively-edited videos which purported to show Planned Parenthood staffers negotiating the sale of fetal tissue, a practice which is illegal. Since then, 12 state-level and 4 congressional investigations have found no such wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood. Despite these exonerations, the video series continued to reverberate, spawning state and federal efforts to defund the women’s health provider.

The charges dismissed today were issued in January by the Harris County District Attorney’s office. After the CMP videos, the office had assembled a grand jury to investigate Planned Parenthood but after an extensive investigation that spanned more than two months, the group cleared the women’s health provider and chose to indict Daleiden and Merritt instead. The grand jury also charged the pair with a class A misdemeanor: offering to buy human organs, namely fetal tissue. The pair was cleared of this charge in June.

After Tuesday morning’s dismissal, Daleiden touted the victory on Twitter:

But Daleiden’s legal troubles aren’t over yet. A lawsuit filed last summer against CMP by the National Abortion Federation is ongoing, as is a suit filed by Planned Parenthood in California in January, accusing the CMP of racketeering, illegally creating and using fake driver’s licenses, and invading the privacy of, and illegally recording, Planned Parenthood officials and staff.

Link to article:

Planned Parenthood Sting Videographer Cleared of Felony Charge

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Planned Parenthood Sting Videographer Cleared of Felony Charge

Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

Mother Jones

Few figures in the climate change debate are as polarizing as former Vice President Al Gore. His fans and his enemies are equally rabid, and his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth is still probably the most-referenced document on climate change in history. In the last few years, Gore’s global warming work has mostly been channeled into a nonprofit he oversees called the Climate Reality Project, which organizes rallies and educational events.

This week, that group held its annual “24 Hours of Reality” marathon of live-streamed videos and appearances by Gore and other celebrities to raise funds for climate action. The event took place in New York City, which is gearing up for a series of meetings and protests in advance of the biggest climate summit of the last five years, to take place Tuesday at the United Nations. Gore took a break from the broadcast to chat with Climate Desk’s Inquiring Minds podcast, offering his views on everything from President Obama’s climate polices and the role of the tea party in US politics to his hopes for a strong international climate treaty.

Gore said that Obama hasn’t yet gone far enough in his efforts against climate change, but that he nonetheless admires “what the president has done.”

“In his first term I expressed some considerable concern about what I thought he was failing to do,” Gore said, adding that after the demise of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate, “there was not the kind of energy and activity that I felt was appropriate.” But Gore credited Obama for shifting course dramatically in his second term, and for going around the “logjam” in Congress by instructing the EPA to issue “historic regulations” on carbon emissions from power plants.

Gore did criticize some of Obama’s policies, including the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, which Gore described as the “prevailing code for ‘let’s keep burning fossil fuels.'”

“But it’s not fair to just take those things out of context without looking at the totality of his policies,” he added. “And the totality of what he’s doing now in his second term is really historic.”

Gore expressed skepticism about the fracking boom. He said he opposed the use of natural gas as a bridge fuel—something the Obama administration has supported—”until and unless they demonstrate the ability to stop the methane leaks at every stage of the process, particularly during fracking.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that some scientists argue can negate the climate benefits of burning natural gas instead of coal.) And he added that the increasing cost-effectiveness of solar and wind power was already posing a “threat to the viability of natural gas as a source of energy in the marketplace.”

You can hear Gore’s comments in full on this week’s episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast, below, and see the highlights of his comments in our exclusive video above.

See original article – 

Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

U.S. mayors call for emergency action on climate change

The cities have spoken

U.S. mayors call for emergency action on climate change

Shutterstock

America’s mayors have sent an urgent message to federal lawmakers – and to the nation: “Emergency action” is needed on climate change.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, a bipartisan group that represents the leaders of 1,400 cities, each of which is home to at least 30,000 people, has called on the Obama administration and Congress to “enact an Emergency Climate Protection law that provides a framework and funding for the implementation … of a comprehensive national plan” to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

If members of Congress understood the urgency of climate change as well as the nation’s mayors do, we might not be in as much of a screwed-up climate situation as we are in today.

The resolution, which was approved by delegates during four days of meetings in Dallas, expresses strong support for the EPA’s draft rules on power-plant pollution. It also calls on Congress to hurry up and extend renewable energy tax credits.

Another resolution approved by the group endorses the establishment of Obama’s proposed $1 billion climate-adaptation fund.

“[R]esiliency efforts, especially those regarding water and wastewater, not only save lives and taxpayer dollars but also play a key role in preparing cities for the challenges they face from these events,” the adaptation-related resolution stated. “[C]ities currently face several barriers to properly planning and implementing resiliency efforts, including funding and financing challenges, insufficient permitting and regulatory flexibility, a shortage of data and modeling information, and a lack of communication and partnership among communities.”

The message being broadcast by the nation’s mayors sounds particularly strong once you consider that more than four-fifths of Americans live in cities.

And it’s not like the mayors are looking to shirk their own responsibilities when it comes to helping protect their residents from the whims of global warming and environmental upheaval. They simply recognize the dire need for federal leadership and assistance.

Another resolution approved on Monday “encourages” the group’s members to “prioritize natural infrastructure,” such as parks, marshes, and estuaries, to help protect freshwater supplies, defend the nation’s coastlines, and protect air quality amid worsening floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires.

Laura Tam, the sustainable development policy director at San Francisco-based urban affairs think tank SPUR, described that resolution as a “statement that de-polarizes climate adaptation.” After all, Tam told Grist, “Who can argue with the premise of encouraging cities to protect waters, coasts, plant trees and improve air quality?”

Well, we can think of some members of Congress who might try to argue with it — as if their campaign donations depended on it.


Source
Full list of resolutions approved during four-day meeting in Dallas, U.S. Conference of Mayors

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Politics

From – 

U.S. mayors call for emergency action on climate change

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on U.S. mayors call for emergency action on climate change

Climate change just reshaped America’s wildfire strategy

Climate change just reshaped America’s wildfire strategy

EricF2000

Like a tree in a greenhouse, America’s forest fire problem is growing ominously. Rising temperatures and declining rain and snowfall are parching fire-prone areas and juicing conflagrations. On Thursday, following years of meetings and scientific reviews, the Obama administration published a 101-page strategy that aims to help meet the country’s shifting fire threats.

The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy divides the nation according to fire risks, and profiles the communities that face those risks. “No one-size-fits-all approach exists to address the challenges facing the Nation,” the strategy states.

Despite covering 70,000 communities and 46 million homes, the strategy can be boiled down to guidelines that aim to do three main things: restore and maintain landscapes that are resilient to fire; brace communities and infrastructure for occasional blazes; and help officials make wise decisions about how and whether flames should be doused. Here’s what that all looks like in flowchart form:

Click to embiggen.

“As climate change spurs extended droughts and longer fire seasons, this collaborative wildfire blueprint will help us restore forests and rangelands to make communities less vulnerable,” said Mike Boots, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Read original article:  

Climate change just reshaped America’s wildfire strategy

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, Free Press, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Climate change just reshaped America’s wildfire strategy